The #MeToo movement had already named and shamed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, comedian Louis C.K., U.S. senator Al Franken and celebrity chef Mario Batali when Elizabeth Dunn decided she had something to say about her classmates at Middlebury College.
On December 12, the senior went on Facebook to post a short list of “men to avoid” at Vermont’s most prestigious college and solicited input from others. She added the crowdsourced names to her list until she had called out 36 male students and recent graduates for sexual misbehavior, ranging from serial rape to harassment.
Not all of the accusers were female. A few cases involved males or nonbinary students identifying men responsible for sexual misdeeds, according to Dunn.
Facebook removed the post within 48 hours, but screenshots of the list continue to circulate on campus. The incident gained national traction after it was covered on Babe.net, the same online outlet that published the much-debated anonymous account of a woman’s “worst night of my life” date with comedian Aziz Ansari. In its Middlebury story, the website that proudly claims to be “for girls who don’t give a fuck” blacked out the names on Dunn’s list.
Like Ansari’s defenders, some say Dunn, 21, went too far: What began as overdue acknowledgment of a vast sexual harassment problem has devolved into unfair and unsupported charges against men. Middlebury may expel Dunn, and she is worried that sanctions by the college could derail her plans to graduate in May and attend law school in the fall.
But other observers see Dunn’s list as an act of bravery and, perhaps, desperation.
“There is an epidemic of sexual assault and everything else you can think of — violence, belittlement, discrimination, stalking, coercion — which happens on college and university campuses every day,” said Felicia Kornbluh, a feminist and associate professor of history at the University of Vermont.
Women have issued warnings about men for a long time, and Dunn’s list is a modern way to frame the message, Kornbluh said. It’s “like what we used to do with writing names on the bathroom wall,” she said. “It’s sort of the weapon of the weak.”
The list is a reminder that many victims don’t feel they can trust in police or campus judicial systems to seek redress, Kornbluh said: “It’s a sign of our utter failure institutionally.”
Numerous students have shared stories with her of being victimized, she added. “It’s pretty ubiquitous, and I hear no stories in which people used the university or other judicial procedures and got relief. That basically never happens,” Kornbluh said. “So here we are. If I was an undergraduate, I might be writing on Facebook, too.”
Culture Shock
Dunn said yes to Middlebury four years ago without ever having seen the place. The Atlanta, Ga., resident picked the college in part because it is known for its foreign languages and offered Arabic, which she’d studied in the rigorous International Baccalaureate program at her public high school.
Middlebury also offered financial aid to cover most of the cost of her four-year education. The teen was too busy with exams at the time to take advantage of an invitation to fly up and visit. Dunn, whom her friends call Liz, turned down similar offers from Brandeis University, American University, and the College of William and Mary to come to Vermont.
Dunn was eager to get out of the South and experience a new culture, a new place. But the transition for the African American daughter of a single hotel housekeeper mom was “jarring,” as Dunn described it on a couch inside Middlebury’s on-campus radio station, WRMC 91.1 FM, on the second floor of Proctor Hall. (She hosts a weekly program, “Cannabis Feminist,” that explores “the intersections of marijuana, feminism, race, class and the prison industrial complex.”) The mostly white, mostly wealthy and very sports-oriented school culture at Middlebury was indeed unfamiliar.
And, like many new college students, Dunn found herself navigating social situations for which she was unprepared. One night during her first year, she attended a party, met a guy and went to his room. According to Dunn, the student, a senior, plied her with alcohol to the point where she was “very drunk.” They had a sexual encounter even though Dunn now says she “didn’t really know what was happening” and “didn’t really consent to a lot of what was happening.”
Dunn tearfully explained that, the next day, she knew something terrible had occurred but didn’t want to fully admit it to herself. She never reported the incident to police or campus judicial officers because she did not want to face humiliating questions that “chip away at you” and blame the victim, she said.
But she came to view the encounter as a sexual assault. And late last year, inspired by the #MeToo movement — and the “Shitty Media Men” list circulating online with claims about professionals in that industry — Dunn accused the student in her December 12 Facebook post that quickly grew into a list of 36 men. She revealed only his first name and encouraged other students to direct message, aka “DM,” her on Facebook with the names of their abusers. She promised to add them to her list.
“The messages just started pouring in,” Dunn recalled, adding that she was surprised by how many students wanted to share their experiences of being victimized by harassment and sexual assault. “There’s just a lot of collective pain and trauma that people have experienced here,” Dunn said of Middlebury College.
Before Facebook took it down due to complaints, the post listed the offenders — almost all by both first and last names — along with various accusations after each one, from “serial rapist” to “emotionally abusive” to “treats women, especially black women, like shit.”
Dunn’s post ended with these words: “here’s to not being complicit in 2018 and feel free to dm me more names to add to this status because I could really give a fuck about protecting the privacy of abusers.”
All of this happened as students were preparing to leave campus for the holiday break. Before she headed home to Atlanta, Dunn got a call from a campus judicial officer asking to meet. Initially, the purpose seemed to be to offer her comfort and support as a victim of sexual assault, Dunn said. But then the officer, whom she won’t name, asked her to identify and provide contact information for those students who gave her the names of the men on the list.
Dunn said she refused to cooperate because she had promised to protect the privacy of the victims; she has since deleted all of their messages. Then, last week, Dunn said she was summoned again to meet with Middlebury judicial officers. On January 17, they told her she was officially facing college discipline for violating the privacy of other students — that is, those individuals she outed on the list.
“I could be facing suspension or expulsion. Middlebury judicial affairs has refused to take anything off the table right now,” said Dunn, who is majoring in gender, sexuality and feminism studies. The possibility that she might not be able to finish at Middlebury is sobering, she said, but she still feels she did the right thing.
“This harm is being done by, like, specific people and by specific individuals, and if we want to move toward a conversation about, like, healing and accountability and growth, there needs to be some acknowledgment that harm was done,” Dunn said. “So I think that the list was collectively generated not only by me, but by a pretty large group of survivors. It was like taking a moment to say, ‘This is our experience. This is what happened to us.'”
Men About Campus
Students weren’t eager to speak to this reporter about Dunn or her list on a snowy afternoon last Thursday. More than half a dozen males declined to comment on the record about the controversy, but each was aware of it. The roster continues to circulate, they said, because so many people took screenshots of the post before Facebook pulled it down.
“For someone to just post a name, post an allegation and not have anything to back it up, it’s hard to respect that,” said a male first-year student on campus who did not want his name used. Others said the post “freaked” students out but triggered necessary conversations.
Samantha Valone, a Middlebury sophomore from the Boston area, said it was a good thing to call attention to sexual violence. But, she added, “I just kind of feel bad for some of the people who were maybe accused and are innocent, because their lives are pretty rough right now.”
The range of misdeeds, alleged or real, also varied widely, she noted, from emotional abuse to the much more serious “serial rape,” and “they maybe shouldn’t have been put on the same list,” Valone said.
After Facebook took down the list, some students decried the decision online and even accused the social media giant of being complicit in sexual assault, observed Nathaniel Wiener, a Middlebury College senior and a reporter for the student newspaper, the Middlebury Campus, which published a December 23 story on Dunn.
But other students immediately felt the list was unfair and still do, Wiener said last week. The controversy comes on the heels of another Middlebury mess that went national last March, when student protesters shut down a talk by The Bell Curve coauthor Charles Murray and injured a professor in the process.
Dunn helped organize that public demonstration, too, calling Murray’s race-based theories about intelligence deeply offensive. On November 13, she took part in a “performance activism” piece in front of Proctor called “Laurie’s Big Apology.” Students in cheerleading getups waved metallic pom-poms as they lampooned Middlebury president Laurie Patton’s effort to respond to continuing protests around the Murray event during a town-hall-style meeting she had convened a few days earlier.
To see the college headed back into the headlines over a new scandal upset a number of alumni, according to Wiener. Some reached out to him to ask about Dunn’s motivations with the list. “My answer was, ‘I don’t know,'” said Wiener.
It didn’t help that immediately after the social media blast, the college issued emails to the student body that appeared to take one side, and then the other. The first urged victims to report harassment or assault to the college judicial office. The second urged people falsely accused to report that, too, to the same office. The messages just added to the confusion around the list, Wiener said.
“It was like you get into a fight in the schoolyard, and your parents say, ‘Well, I don’t really know what happened, but make sure you don’t do it again,'” Wiener said.
The federal law known as Title IX prohibits Middlebury and other educational institutions from discriminating on the basis of gender. Although it is well known for improving women’s access and participation in athletics, the statute also provides guidance on campus judicial reviews of sexual assaults.
College officials would not confirm that Dunn is facing possible sanctions, nor would they say if any of the individuals on the list might be. A request to interview Patton was denied. But college spokeswoman Sarah Ray offered this statement on her behalf: “Middlebury takes all allegations regarding sexual assault and discrimination extremely seriously. Our policies encourage reporting of assaults and ensure that allegations are investigated thoroughly, fairly and confidentially. The public posting of allegations raises many issues for our community and has no role in a fair and balanced process.
“An investigation into all aspects of this incident is under way,” the statement continued, “and we will work to ensure that Middlebury carefully follows its policies regarding sexual assault, harassment and other Title IX allegations, as well as its policies regarding respect for persons.”
Justice or Witch Hunt?
This is not the first time social media has been used in a campus sexual assault allegation. Alec Rose is a Santa Monica, Calif., attorney with a national practice that specializes in college assault cases. He’s not representing anyone in connection with the Middlebury incident.
One of his clients was recently cleared in a campus judicial review process, and the alleged victim chose not to appeal but later tweeted the young man’s name with the accusation that he was a “rapist loose on campus” and that the college was whitewashing that fact, Rose said. “It was very devastating for the young man,” and he withdrew from the school, according to Rose, who declined to release more specific details.
Meanwhile, the accuser could have channeled her anger into an appeal, he added. Using social media as it was in that case, and in others, can be deeply unfair, Rose said: “I think it’s a dangerous way for somebody to seek redress, both to them and the people they are accusing.”
He had a similar reaction after reading the story about Dunn’s list on Babe.
“Without knowing that she had substance to back up her accusations against these 30 young men, I don’t know how this could be deemed responsible,” Rose said, adding: “It’s certainly very humiliating to the people she reported on … It may be a situation where some of them may not be able to recover their reputation.”
Dunn said she considered the risk that someone would sue her for defamation of character when she posted the list, but she doesn’t believe it will happen — in part because legal action would generate unwanted publicity. She hasn’t heard from lawyers for any of the accused young men.
Another factor is the veracity of the claim. “In a campus situation, or in any situation where someone has alleged defamation by [an allegation of] sexual assault, one defense to that would be truth, that it actually happened,” said Burlington attorney Ben Luna, who has no direct connection to the Middlebury situation but has represented students facing various charges and tried many sexual assault cases in his former career as a prosecutor.
“There’s a whole host of issues at play here, legal and otherwise,” Luna said.
Meanwhile, some female public figures, including French actress Catherine Deneuve, are warning that the #MeToo movement is turning into a witch hunt.
Is Middlebury an example of overreach on campuses?
“My immediate reaction to that is no,” Luna said. Historically speaking, sexual assault has “been a grossly underreported crime,” and victims have not felt able to go to the courts for many reasons, Luna said.
“There’s a whole laundry list of reasons why an individual will not report, will not disclose,” Luna said. “Some of those examples are the fear that no one will believe them, embarrassment. A lot of sex assault victims blame themselves.” Luna said one teenage victim he worked with wasn’t fully aware she had been violated. “She didn’t really know what rape was,” he said.
Back at Middlebury, Dunn is waiting to see how the college disciplinary process treats her. Her friends are petitioning against punitive action, and Dunn is applying to law schools.
She said she isn’t concerned that her activism could adversely affect her chances of getting in. Her plan B: landing a job in the Bronx public defender’s office.
Dunn has heard nothing from the man she personally accused and has never directly told him how she felt about the evening. Does she think he would view the incident as sexual assault? “Probably not,” she said. “And that’s another thing that is really typical here.”
Men are sometimes raised to ignore social cues and feel a sense of entitlement, while women may be socialized not to say no or to accept things so men feel more comfortable, suggested Dunn.
Reactions from men on the list haven’t all been negative. Some of the accused have “glared” at Dunn in the dining hall or said “not very nice” things, she allowed. But others have approached her to discuss the allegations and even said they wanted to create a forum for broader conversation.
Tyler McDowell, a junior from Pennsylvania, was accused on the list of making “fetishistic, racist, sexual comments about black women.” He doesn’t remember making such comments and does not know who claims he made them, McDowell told Seven Days.
Still, he doesn’t feel he was treated unfairly. “I do not feel wronged by this. I also would stipulate that other men probably shouldn’t, either,” said McDowell.
The list was a “wake-up call” that should trigger discussion about the need for an end to the behaviors that were described on the list, he added. It’s “one way of broadcasting kind of a general call for culture change.”
Correction, January 25, 2018: Felicia Kornbluh called posting names a “weapon of the weak.” And earlier version of this story contained an error.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2018.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
To all who are appalled, outraged, tortured by what Ms. Dunn has published and accused people of doing, I have one suggestion: ask every woman you know- mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, friends, aunts, cousins- if they have ever been sexually assaulted. Until you know how many people you love have been hurt by sex or sexual interactions they did not want, you operate from a blissful state of ignorance that renders your outrage ridiculous. You do not understand this issue or this problem, and so you cannot understand why a woman who was assaulted would create a platform for other women to share their pain. And to the person who feels he was wrongly accused, know that the pain you describe is not unique. Speak to women who are living with the pain and memories of having been assaulted or, as you say, “regretting a hookup,” and maybe you’ll discover the similarities.
Witch hunts are not the answer. When have we gone too far in the name of political correctness?”What began as overdue acknowledgment of a vast sexual harassment problem has devolved into unfair and unsupported charges against men.” She’s no less sheltered or entitled than the white, rich students she appears to criticize. “Coming to this” is the worst kind of muckraking and puts this “strong woman” on the same level as Fox news & Breitbart.
It’s sheer irony that this Middlebury student not only “outed” 36 *harassers, assaulters, and rapists* — with hearsay, but absolutely no proof — is the same person who helped assault free speech and molest liberal intellectual debate on campus in the last Middlebury student crisis. Political correctness gone amok — and Middlebury College is the poster child, even more so than Yale and Stanford.
She was a central figure in repressing free speech on campus because she was offended by it. She’d rather shut down free speech than allow discourse — on a college campus no less! But she then insists her slander (or libel) should be protected by free speech. Double-standard much?
Rape and sexual abuse should not be tolerated but to publish names with no regard to the validity of the accusation is the same. How easy is it that there could be no truth to the accusation but it is a convenient way to pay the person back for some other slight…and in today’s world there is not much consideration of the consequences of public accusations with no basis in fact.
Her actions are vile and disgusting as the acts she pathetically tries protest. Neither hold any place in a civilized free society. I sincerely hope that all of the names she listed individually file civil suits against her and the leaders of Middlebury for allowing her to continue to walk around campus.
Good news for Ms. Dunn there are plenty of totalitarian states in the world that would be more than willing to hire someone who doesn’t have any regard for due process.
It would be one thing if Ms. Dunn had only accused her own molester (alleged molester, that is), from a drunken college episode 3 years ago. But that is not what she did. She accused people by name she doesnt know, of being rapists, based on unverified reports from other people she doesnt know. She accused scores of people shes never talked to, never met, and never will meet. She has no knowledge of the facts and circumstances of any of the cases other than her own. She publicized accusations of rape from people who, as far she knows, could be fabricating the stories. Now shes ruined the lives of people she completely doesnt know because shes angry about an encounter with one person she had 3 years ago.
There can be no doubt that college women are sexually assaulted. Each accusation deserves fair, accurate, unbiased investigation. But statistics can never, ever justify making wrongful accusations against an actual individual. Individuals are not statistics. No individual person is guilty of rape by virtue of statistics. No person is guilty of actually raping someone merely because a study says that a certain number of college women are sexually assaulted.
In response to Leonard Bast: The Department of Justice released a national study in 2016 showing that as many as 1 in 4 college women are sexually assaulted in college. There is also the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation study from 2015 showing that 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted in college. Thus, Ms. Kornbluh’s comments on the epidemic of sexual assault are not “histrionic” at all– they are factual. This is really happening all the time, despite its unpleasant and unfortunate nature.
In response to the commenter urging victims to go to emergency services: Rape kits can be a helpful tool at times, but to shame women for not attaining a rape kit immediately after being assaulted demonstrates poor understanding of sexual violence and a severe lack of empathy. Sometimes those services are not accessible, sometimes they are not applicable to the situation, and sometimes the sheer trauma and shame of rape can prevent a person from being able to seek help.
Perhaps it’s time to actually listen to women who come forward and are trying to keep themselves and one another safe by sharing their actual lived experiences and using the tools they have to do so. It seems like they might know best.
The worst part is that there are names on that list who have actually brutally raped people, yet they probably wont face any disciplinary action because of the immature, childish and despicable way you went about making this list. You made a recent Facebook post and asked for support from others. Where is my support for being the victim of an attention-seekers sick scheme? I urge you to take responsibility for your disgusting actions.
-Wrongly Accused
P.S. Go take a sex education class. There are legal definitions for rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.
Do you know what its like to wake up sobbing in the middle of the night not realizing what youre crying about? Or what its like to leave your room having people constantly staring at you and questioning if youre a good person or not? Its scary, nerve-wrecking and makes you re-examine every friendship and relationship you have established. And the worst part is there was nothing I could have done to prevent this; I did not do anything wrong yet you decided to publicly list my name as someone who committed an atrocious act even though a) you and I are not friends b) you and I have never spoken to each other and c) you and I know nothing about each other. What you did damaged my life in more ways than you know. Im falling into a deep depression and do not know how to climb out of it. I have considered killing myself and hope to God that I have enough strength to get through the rest of this year. Let me be clear when I say I support #metoo and hope that people who have committed sexual assault will pay for their actions. What you did wasnt #metoo, it was a selfish attempt at garnering some fame and attention for yourself. But guess what? All it has done has damaged the Middlebury community and the lives and reputations of many innocent people. Your actions have shown that you are a narcissist who has no compassion or care for others. (continued)
Before I even go into what this has done to me, I will first start off with this: your claim about me is 100% wrong. I have done my best to listen to the needs of every single person I have hooked up with and will continue to do so. Rape is a very serious topic and I support hearing the accounts of people who have been assaulted. That being said, what you wrote about me was false, and therefore constitutes as slander and libel (both of which are against the law). It is very possible that a girl could have had some regret after a hookup, been uncomfortable at some point (but did not verbalize that or make that clear in her gestures), or been pissed off for some other reason. That is NOT the same thing as rape. Ever since you posted this list, things have not been the same. I have become very anxious in general and have had dark thoughts circulating in my mind: thoughts about hurting myself so I can escape my miserable state. One day my life was seemingly fine and the next it all changed because of what YOU did. You didnt even make an effort to see if these names that you were being privately messaged were actually guilty and that is truly appalling (continued)
Dear Elizabeth Dunn,
On the the early morning of December 13, 2017, my life changed forever. I became aware of a Facebook status that you had posted earlier that day in which you talked about how you found it disturbing that men who violated boundaries of women at Middlebury remained anonymous. So you made “A List of Men To Avoid”, and put my name on it, with the word rapist next to it. You requested people to private message you names so that you could add more to this list. Photocopies were made and friends of yours handed them out on campus. To put it more frankly, you made a giant blacklist with serious allegations (continued)